I get a bang out of coins
I am a fan of the CBS television series “The Big Bang Theory.”
You might call it life with nerds, geeks or whatever pejorative term you want to use about smart but awkward people.
It has raised their profile and made it OK to be awkward, even respectable.
You might call it social status rehabilitation.
My only regret about the show is that none of the characters collects coins.
We collectors are still in the doghouse of public opinion.
We pursue a hobby that is seen as increasingly odd in an ever more computerized world.
Perhaps I should write “old” rather than “odd.”
Numismatics has always seen its prime among people of middle age, but more and more we are sliding further up the age scale.
MS-60 and MS-70 almost equally applies to our ages as to the quality of the coins we own.
The public knows it.
Spending time with coins is something gramps does when there is nothing else to do.
There was an episode last season where winning a gold coin was the prize for the characters’ three teams.
Ultimately four gold coins were involved. That’s a positive.
But I kept thinking that there was no way the character supplying the coins would spend the kind of money to obtain four real gold coins of the size that were briefly shown on screen.
Perhaps that is a nitpick of a collector working his way up the grading scale of age.
At least the coins were not used as a sight gag that indicated cheapness. That’s a storyline from another TV series.
I should be grateful for the small step forward those gold coins represented.
Buzz blogger Dave Harper is winner of the 2014 Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."
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